Getting started with MongoDB is easy, but once you begin building applications with it, you'll face some complex issues. What are the tradeoffs between normalized and denormalized data? How do you handle replica set failure and failover? This collection of MongoDB tips, tricks, and hacks helps you resolve issues with everything from application design and implementation to data safety and monitoring.

You get specific guidance in five topic areas directly from engineers at 10gen, the company that develops and supports this open source database:

Application Design Tips: What to keep in mind when designing your schema

Kristina Chodorow

Kristina Chodorow, a software engineer at 10gen, is a core contributor to the MongoDB project and has worked on the database server, PHP driver, Perl driver, and many other areas. She’s given talks at conferences around the world, including OSCON, LinuxCon, FOSDEM, and Latinoware.

This book delivers on its promise: It is short, concise, and chock-full of useful tidbits that can help immensely at any stage of working with a MongoDb application. Each "tip" takes typically around a page, clearly outlining the main idea and the benefits or tradeoffs involved. The tips are organized in chapters ranging from Application Design to Administration and cover the full spectrum of MongoDb needs.

What you will not find in this book is lengthy examples or detailed explanations. The author has made a conscious decision to keep all tips short, and refers to other sources of information at the few bits were more explanation is needed. The result is a ton of useful information packed in a mere 52 pages. You will make a first pass through it in a few hours, and keep referring to it for the rest of your application's lifetime.

If I had to find one flaw in the book, it would be that tips don't always start on a new page. I would have expected them to. But it didn't have any noticeable effect on the ability to locate a particular tip.

This book is not meant to be an introduction to using MongoDb, nor is it meant to be a detailed analysis on how to structure your application's database. There are other excellent books for that. It will however be an excellent resource of information as you are working with your application.

I've been learning the world of MongoDB for a little while now, building up my understanding of how it works, and Trade-offs to be considered when entering into the world of noSQL. With the query support and other interesting properties Mongo has been the system I've been diving deep into, and getting some real experience with. As an ex Oracle DBA, working through the strengths and weaknesses of Document based databases has been interesting. The book 50 Tips and Tricks for MongoDB Developers, provides some good food for thought relating to the tradeoffs when working with document stores in general and MongoDB in particular. The end of the book also delves into advanced configuration and production topics such as replication and restoring from backups. I'll admit that I let these topics was over me without fully grokking them.

The book is a pretty quick and easy read, and leads you through how to model and work with documents in MongoDB. I'd recommend it to people who understand the basics of MongoDB and want to dive deeper.

[this book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]